Abstract
Synthetic data consists of artificially generated data. When data are scarce, or of poor quality, synthetic data can be used, for example, to improve the performance of machine learning models. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a state-of-the-art deep generative models that can generate novel synthetic samples that follow the underlying data distribution of the original dataset. Reviews on synthetic data generation and on GANs have already been written. However, none in the relevant literature, to the best of our knowledge, has explicitly combined these two topics. This survey aims to fill this gap and provide useful material to new researchers in this field. That is, we aim to provide a survey that combines synthetic data generation and GANs, and that can act as a good and strong starting point for new researchers in the field, so that they have a general overview of the key contributions and useful references. We have conducted a review of the state-of-the-art by querying four major databases: Web of Sciences (WoS), Scopus, IEEE Xplore, and ACM Digital Library. This allowed us to gain insights into the most relevant authors, the most relevant scientific journals in the area, the most cited papers, the most significant research areas, the most important institutions, and the most relevant GAN architectures. GANs were thoroughly reviewed, as well as their most common training problems, their most important breakthroughs, and a focus on GAN architectures for tabular data. Further, the main algorithms for generating synthetic data, their applications and our thoughts on these methods are also expressed. Finally, we reviewed the main techniques for evaluating the quality of synthetic data (especially tabular data) and provided a schematic overview of the information presented in this paper.

Abstract
Higher Education Institutions use social media as a marketing channel to attract and engage users so that the institution is promoted and thus a wide range of benefits can be achieved. These institutions are evaluated globally on various success parameters, being published in rankings. In this paper, we analyze the publishing strategies and compare the results with their overall ranking positions. The results show that there is a tendency to find a particular strategy in the top ranked universities. We also found cases where the strategies are less prominent and do not match the ranking positions. Copyright © 2022 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.

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In this paper we examine the use of social media as a marketing channel by Higher Education Institutions (HEI) and its impact on the institution's brand, attracting top professionals and students. HEIs are annually evaluated globally based on various success parameters to be published in rankings. Specifically, we analyze the Twitter publishing strategies of the selected HEIs, and we compare the results with their overall ranking positions. Our study shows that there are no significant differences between the well-known university rankings based on Kendall t and RBO metrics. However, our data retrieval indicates a tendency for the top-ranked universities to adopt specific strategies, which are further emphasized when analyzing emotions and topics. Conversely, some universities have less prominent strategies that do not align with their ranking positions. This study provides insights into the role of social media in the marketing strategies of HEIs and its impact on their global rankings. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

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